Page 70 of Fear Me, Love Me

“But she’s my friend,” Vivienne says.

“This bitch is not your friend,” I seethe. I lean down and rip the tape from Julia Merrick’s mouth, and she gasps in pain. “Why have you been stalking Vivienne?”

Tears spill down the girl’s face. She’s shaking with fear, and she can barely get the words out. “I don’t understand what’s happening. I didn’t do anything to Vivienne. Are…are you Tyrant Mercer?”

What a little actress she is.

She turns to Vivienne. “What’s happening? Why do you have a gun? Please help me.”

Julia appealing to my woman makes rage swirl through me, and I slap her hard across the face. She cries out and sprawls across the grass. She hurt Vivienne, and that’s not going unpunished.

Vivienne turns anxious eyes on me. “Tyrant, she’s already scared of you. Is it necessary to hit her?”

It’s more than fucking necessary. It’s the only thing that matters right now.

I take out a knife and show it to the Merrick girl. “I’ll ask you again, and then I’ll begin slicing up that pretty face of yours. Why have you been stalking Vivienne?”

The Merrick girl sniffles and whimpers for a moment. She meets Vivienne’s eyes and then looks away again. Finally, she says in a small voice, “My father made me do it.”

Vivienne lets out a cry of shock.

I stand over the young woman, seething with fury as she admits to everything. Spray paintingTyrant’s sluton Vivienne’s house after seeing me climbing out Vivienne’s window and leaving the dorms. Stalking me so often that she was there the night I trapped Vivienne in my labyrinth and took the photographs of us having sex. Julia was able to climb a tree outside my walls and point a telescopic lens at us. She’s a hobby photographer and used her own darkroom to develop the images and deliver them to Vivienne’s family home.

“I thought you were only interested in photographing gardens,” Vivienne says faintly. She’s turned pale while listening to what her so-called friend has to say. “Why would you do such horrible things to me?”

I wait with narrowed eyes. I don’t give a damn what Julia Merrick has to say. I crave her blood and her screams, but Vivienne deserves an answer. “You have one more second to start talking, or I start slicing.”

Julia shrinks fearfully from my knife. “Because I had no choice. Dad told me it was my duty to marry Mr. Mercer. He’d done his part by approaching with the offer, and I had to close the deal. We all have to do our part to advance Dad’s political career so he can become the mayor, then governor, and then eventually the president. I…I thought about approaching Mr. Mercer and flirting with him, but I was so nervous, and I didn’t know what he liked. I thought if I discovered more about him it would be easier, and then when I found out that he was obsessed with my friend…” She trails off miserably.

“You had to take Vivienne out of the competition,” I guess.

“I thought Vivienne would avoid you once her family told her to give you up. They hated you so much after you stole her little brother. But the photos didn’t work, and I was starting to get desperate. I had no choice,” Julia says, beseeching me. “I didn’t want to hurt Vivienne, but…”

I feel a thud of anger as I realize what she’s saying. It’s worse than stalking and humiliating Vivienne. Much worse. “The three boys who attacked her in the cemetery. You told them to do it.”

“Julia, you didn’t,” Vivienne cries.

The Merrick girl starts to sob. “I didn’t want them to kill Vivienne. I thought maybe they would scare her and put her off, um, men.”

I lean down and seize the front of her T-shirt, brandishing the knife in her face. “You wanted them to rape her so brutally that she’d be too traumatized to love me? You’re a fucked-up little bitch.”

“I had to do it,” she cries, her eyes so wide with fear that the whites are showing all the way around. “Dad was at me night and day to make it happen. The only time he talked to me was to tell me to be useful to him, or else I’d lose my inheritance, my college payments, and my allowance. My future and my place in the family was at risk.” She hesitates and adds in a defiant rush, “I had a good reason for what I did because family comes first. At least I didn’t tell someone to rape my own child over a debt of a few thousand dollars.”

All this time, Julia has focused on me, but now she glances at someone over my shoulder. Behind me, Owen Stone inhales sharply.

What. The.Fuck.

I slowly let go of Julia and turn around. Stone’s expression is filled with guilt and alarm that he quickly tries to smother with confusion.

“Julia, what are you talking about?” Stone gives a nervous laugh.

Owen Stone, the man who resents his daughter so much that he can discard her like an old rag. Owen Stone, the man with a gambling addiction and so many debts his own wife doesn’t know the state of their finances. Owen Stone, whose friend tried to rape Vivienne. Who wouldn’t believe her when she told him it happened, and who hurt her so much by calling her a liar that her body and soul will bear the scars until the day she dies.

Owen Stone, who is breaking out in a cold, guilty sweat right before my eyes.

25

Vivienne

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